“The Director walked slowly down the line of cots. Rosy and relaxed with sleep, eighty little boys and girls lay softly breathing. There was a whisper under every pillow. The DHC halted and, bending over one of the little beds, listened attentively. […]
‘… all wear green,’ said a soft but very distinct voice, beginning in the middle of a sentence, ‘and Delta children wear khaki. Oh no, I don’t want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They’re too stupid to be able to read or write. Besides, they wear black, which is such a beastly colour. I’m so glad I’m a Beta.’”
When we go to sleep, our senses don’t. This should be fairly obvious for anyone who has an alarm clock. Trained over millions of years of evolutionary history, when a loud sound during sleep could be a sign that you’re about to get eaten, our brain processes the sound of the alarm and (most of the time!) rouses us. So, if we can hear while we sleep, then can we hack this process and learn while we sleep? No; according to new research published in the journal Scientific Reports, our sleeping brains seem confined to learning only very basic associations.
Scientists at the Université libre de Bruxelles2 invited participants to take a nap in a type of scanner that measures the magnetic field caused by the electrical activity of neurons. Once sleeping, they were played a series 12 notes (or tones). For half of the time, these notes were randomly ordered (the only stipulation being that consecutive notes did not repeat),but in the other half the notes were arranged into 4 blocks of 3 called “tritones”†. Grouping the notes like this means that there is a statistical regularity to the series of notes (see image).In the real world, the ability to recognise statistical regularities in sounds thought to be important in language learning for infants3. Take a listen to the two samples below and see if you can pick out the one with the regularity!